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Struggling with self-pay: two paths

July 13, 2020
Business Affairs Insurance

1. Automate payment plan offers; do not waste both the patient’s time and your CSRs’ by negotiating each plan individually.

2. Use state-of-the-art data and timely analysis of patient financial standing to offer a range of payment plan installments and terms. Advanced segmentation data will help determine terms that are mutually acceptable to provider and patient.

3. Remove roadblocks: Make self-activation as simple as possible for all patient demographics. (That means accepting paper checks as well as online or mobile plan activation.)

4. Meet modern consumer expectations by offering real-time, 24/7 access to accounts and rolling up new charges into the existing payment plan arrangement (extending the term but retaining installment amounts).

5. Impress healthcare consumers by offering unique features like the ability for other family members to contribute to their loved one’s account.

6. Don’t squander the patient trust you’ve gained by exposing their credit card data to breaches. As hospitals and health systems already know, protecting credit card data can be expensive and time-consuming, typically involving the establishment of a new network or performing cumbersome audits of the existing one. Finding a payment solution that is validated according to the regulatory Payment Card Industry Data Security Standards will save the organization operational costs and the headache of dealing with a data breach.

Both the aggressive collections path and the path of collaborative payment support stand to increase collections for squeezed provider organizations. Only one of them, however, sets the patient-provider relationship on the road toward affordability and improved health—and that relationship is more important now than ever.

About the author: John Talaga is the executive vice president for Healthcare at Flywire.

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